# Post Mortem on API Outage May 5th 2011

DevFeed: [Post Mortem on API Outage May 5th 2011](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/post-mortem-on-api-outage-may-5th-2011-2112.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://developers.soundcloud.com/blog//post-mortem-on-api-outage-may-5th-2011>)

Published: 2011-05-11T00:00:00Z

Content type: article

Language: en

Sources: [SoundCloud Backstage Blog](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/soundcloud-backstage-blog.md>)

Topics: [Post Mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/post-mortem.md>), [API](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/api.md>), [migration](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/migration.md>), [App](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/app.md>), [Database](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/database.md>), [OAuth](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/oauth.md>)

Tags: [announcements](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/announcements.md>), [api](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/api.md>), [bug](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/bug.md>), [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [database](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/database.md>), [migration](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/migration.md>), [oauth](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/oauth.md>), [operations](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/operations.md>), [outage](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/outage.md>), [post-mortem](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/post-mortem.md>), [servers](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/servers.md>), [token](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/token.md>), [tokens](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tokens.md>)

## AI overview

SoundCloud describes a May 5, 2011 API outage caused by a deployment containing a problematic database migration and an application bug that consumed excessive memory. The incident brought down app servers and later exposed inconsistent OAuth 2 token data, invalidating existing tokens until the correct state was restored. No data was lost, and SoundCloud planned more thorough migration testing and safeguards against conflicts with API operations.

## Source excerpt

On Thursday May 5th 2011 we had an API outage from ~9:00 UTC to ~14:00 UTC. This was caused by a deploy that included a migration with...